The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Adam Freeman]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

Why do mentors get burned out? Because mentors have more than one passion, more than one obligation, and finite amounts of time and energy.

Yes!

I am not advocating teams/mentor spend more time on FIRST. I am advocating FIRST makes the time spent more valueable by allowing teams/mentors access to their competition robots.

Probably the most important thing that happened to us this season was getting eliminated in the quarter finals at Waterford. This gave us 3-4 hours of time to work on getting the climber strung and hooks installed. This time with the competition robot, without the pressure of having an up coming match was critical in discovering the issues that were holding us back from climbing. Without this time, I doubt we ever climb in the season.

If we would have advanced, we would have had to wait until Troy to install the parts on the competition robot. We would have then discovered we needed to change the hooks (again!) to get up to level 3. Depending on how far we got with the practice bot (it ended up falling off the tower btw Waterford and Troy, and had to be re-built). We may or may not have continued with the climber development. Knowing that the competition bot was close to climbing was what kept us moving forward.

[Jim Zondag]

Ask the question: "Why do we restrict access to the Robots".
The answer is not because to restrict burnout or any other reason stated here. This is a side effect and not the original intent.
The real answer today is "because we always have". This is not a very good reason. Almost no one who works at FIRST other than Dean and Woodie were here when the decision to institute this policy was made. It persists as an artifact of the past and little more. It really makes very little sense in the modern context of FRC as a season long sport and not a single event.
Look around at any other machine sport on earth and you will very rarely find any kind of restriction like this, if ever. I know of nothing else like it. If your build machines, you need time to learn to use them, time to fix them, Time to test them, and time to improve them. Contintuous improvement and iterative development are two of the core aspects of good engineering process. FRC deliberately squashes these effort for reasons I have never understood.

If you told a race car team that they could not have access to their car for weeks before the big race, they would laugh in your face. Most other machine sports are just as intense as FRC, some are more so, but none of them attempt at putting any extra artificial constraints on access to the machines. When race day comes, you go to the track; that is your only time constraint. FRC does not need to be different.

I actually find in practice that the machine access rules make the sport of FRC much harder for the weaker teams, and give a huge advantage to the well resourced teams. These rules are a major driver of cost, effort, and time investment. they makes the void between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' wider than it would be if we have free access to the robots.
This is not just opnion: the performance data from many seasons of FRC history support the statement that "Teams get better when they use their robots" (Duh!). The way it is today, the well resourced teams have many, many times more time with their robots than everyone else. My team will effectively spend several YEARS of FRC match time driving our practice robot every week during the competition season. We will never have a world in which most teams can build multiple machines per year. The only solution which approaches a more equitable solution is to remove the access restrictions for everyone. As long as this disparity exists, there will be a large amount of stratification in the league.

As for mentor burnout: I personally would spend less time, have lower stress, be able to better empower my students, spend less money, and have more fun if there were no machine access restrictions. The "myth of the 6 weeks" is simply not true, and it has never been true in my experience. Being successful in FRC takes longer than this. We should all stop lying to ourselves.

[Chris Hibner]

I love Isaac's compromise.

I think we would stop building a practice robot at the 4-6 hours per week threshold. I think 6 hours per week would be about right.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

I love Isaac's compromise.

I think we would stop building a practice robot at the 4-6 hours per week threshold. I think 6 hours per week would be about right.

We try to do more than that in just driver practice. It doesn't always work out that way but we try.

[pfreivald]

The problem with these kinds of arguments, of course, is that people do not get to dictate to other people what constitutes "burnout" for them.

[bduddy]

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

If you told a race car team that they could not have access to their car for weeks before the big race, they would laugh in your face. Most other machine sports are just as intense as FRC, some are more so, but none of them attempt at putting any extra artificial constraints on access to the machines. When race day comes, you go to the track; that is your only time constraint. FRC does not need to be different.

Even Formula 1, the most intense and engineering-oriented motorsport of all, has instituted a mandatory "summer break" to prevent burnout of its employees.

http://www.gpupdate.net/en/f1-news/2...iver-holidays/

Food for thought...

[Jim Zondag]

Originally Posted by bduddy

Even Formula 1, the most intense and engineering-oriented motorsport of all, has instituted a mandatory "summer break" to prevent burnout of its employees.

http://www.gpupdate.net/en/f1-news/2...iver-holidays/

Sure, but this FI holiday is more of an agreed upon 2 week break by the participants during the peak of summer so that those with families have some hope of sneaking in a summer vacation. F1 Teams can pick when they do this break based on their own state of preparedness. FRC restriction is kind of the other way around.

[EricH]

I also would be in favor of such a compromise. To a point (there has to be a reasonable limit, or some of us get a pass to a place where every room is padded).

I would suggest the following: Each team may unbag their robot up to 3 times per week, for a grand total of 10 hours (remember the FIX-IT Windows from a few years back, guys? and how you had to use some ridiculous amount of time in one or two shots before they changed it?).

To add complexity (and therefore decrease chances of this part being used...), your withholding allowance decreases proportionally to the amount of time you spend unbagged. If, for example, a team uses none of that time, they can show up with 40 lbs of withholding. BUT, if a team uses ALL of that time, they can show up with 10 lbs (that means, for every hour you spend out of the bag, you lose 3 lbs of withholding, in this example). Teams who crate their robots and ship get 40 lbs for that regional event, 20lbs for Championships. First item on the inspection list is to check the time on the lockup form and the amount of withholding.

[IKE]

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

Sure, but this FI holiday is more of an agreed upon 2 week break by the participants during the peak of summer so that those with families have some hope of sneaking in a summer vacation. F1 Teams can pick when they do this break based on their own state of preparedness. FRC restriction is kind of the other way around.

There are actually lots of goofy rules in Motorsports. For instance NASCAR will let you work on the car. They just won't let you test it:
http://aol.sportingnews.com/nascar/s...-series-venues
At least until this year. That is a big reason why you see so many teams sneaking into high speed wind tunnels at night is because they cannot test on represntative tracks. So, instead of a practice bot, NASCAR teams build "practice facilities".... or at least rents them.
Big Budget teams even bought their own tunnels (think tunnel in a mountian instead of wind tunnel...)
************************************************** *
The long and short of it is teams that want to find a way will, but I am proposing a compromise between the two camps that I think might help some find the balance that others are concerned about.

Currently there is only a small percentage that build a practice bot and fully utilize it. Most teams here in Michigan do use the "out of bag time" or at least 4/6 hours before their district events. Some have even stopped building their practice bots now that they have a reasonable amount of practice time during un-bag. As unbag time increases, this will give more opportunity to those that do not build a practice bot. It might also curb the concerns of those that would "quit if there was no lock-up" period. I have been told this by many people that I have a great deal of respect for. My guess is it is right around 6 hours/week useable in 2 hour blocks minimum.

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by EricH

I would suggest the following: Each team may unbag their robot up to 3 times per week, for a grand total of 10 hours (remember the FIX-IT Windows from a few years back, guys? and how you had to use some ridiculous amount of time in one or two shots before they changed it?).

I don't see how this helps. You build a practice robot, spend all your time tweaking and perfecting on that, then unbag just fast enough to mount the mechanism to the actual robot and do a quick integration test. Then you move on to the next mechanism...

[EricH]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

I don't see how this helps. You build a practice robot, spend all your time tweaking and perfecting on that, then unbag just fast enough to mount the mechanism to the actual robot and do a quick integration test. Then you move on to the next mechanism...

If you don't have a total time limit, or a time limit per unbag, I can think of one very obvious loophole to any unbag rule with a limit on # of times: I bag up the robot once. Then, a few days later, I unbag the robot, and leave it unbagged until a couple of days before competition.

The basic idea is to allow a significant amount of time with the actual robot, theoretically enough to vastly diminish the return from having a practice robot. I suggest a hybrid between # of times you can unbag (which will limit the amount of what you're suggesting) and the total time (which will limit the amount of robots left out of the bag for quite a while before rebagging). I randomly picked a maximum of 3 times for a maximum of 10 hours total, partly to fit with the later text (I originally was going to go for 2 unbags, 6 hours total time).

You may want to take a look at some of the discussions of the Fix-It Windows--I think 2005 was the worst, something about 2 times for 10 hours,and that was just to build spare, replacement, and upgrade parts!--for the compromise suggestion given was effectively a Fix-It window of time, or an MI/MAR unbag period, however you want to see it.

[topgun]

Originally Posted by Adam Freeman

We have a similar design/build schedule. We are not working every day all 6 weeks. We work Tuesday / Thursday 4:15-7:30pm and Satuday 8am-4pm for the majority of the build season. When we need to work more later in the season, we do...or even after.

-Adam

For me, this just begs the question, what is your team doing differently from 99% of the other teams that you can consistently create elite-level robots in 45 days with that kind of build schedule? Is it the amount of mentors with experience, project management, CAD, attitude, students, etc...? Can you elicit some principles that would be concrete takeaways for other teams following this thread.

My team has struggled the last four years producing a working robot by the end of the build season. The team is ready to try a different approach and we really want to look at successful teams to find out what changes we can make to make the build/competition season a much more positive experience. Not just from a successful robot standpoint, but from our students learning that engineering is a wonderful career. Right now we seem to be in a negative lessons learned mode, rather than positive lessons learned moving us forward.

[BJC]

This is an interesting discussion. Here's my perspective on the matter.

[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
Pretend that the entire FRC season is only 12 hours long. The first 6 hours is used by all the teams. However, the option is available to any team to spend some extra time and money to continue to work for the other 6 hours. Teams that choose to spend this extra time and money to get the other 6 hours will generally have a more competitive robot then those who do not -- This is the current situation in FRC.

Now let’s pretend that the entire FRC season is still only 12 hours long. BUT now all the teams can use all 12 hours without having to spend the extra time and money.

- The teams who already spent the extra time and money to get the extra 6 hours will continue to use all 12 hours but will save the time and money they used to use to spend getting them.

- Some of the teams who only used the first 6 hours will continue to only use 6 hours. They were not willing to put in the time and effort to use the other 6 hours before and they are still not. Even so, now they can work every other hour rather then 6 hours straight. This saves them some stress while they maintain the same level of competition that they used to.

- Some of the teams who only used the first 6 hours will choose to work more than 6 hours now that they do not have to put in the extra time and money to get them. These teams might work 8/12 hours, they might work 10/12 and some might even work 12/12. These teams will be more competitive as a result.
]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]

The point is that teams already decide how much time and effort they want to put into their robots. The end of the 6 week build season is not a stopping point but rather the point where extra time, effort, and money is needed to continue working. By eliminating this point teams are allowed to continue working on their robots at their discretion based on how much effort they have decided they want to put into the program but without any barriers to doing so.

Regards, Bryan

[Adam Freeman]

Originally Posted by topgun

For me, this just begs the question, what is your team doing differently from 99% of the other teams that you can consistently create elite-level robots in 45 days with that kind of build schedule? Is it the amount of mentors with experience, project management, CAD, attitude, students, etc...? Can you elicit some principles that would be concrete takeaways for other teams following this thread.

Honestly, I can't really explain it outside of mentor experience. We have an incredible Chief Engineer (Jim Meyer - 13 years in FIRST), who I would argue is the best in all of FIRST.

Many teams have asked how we do it....and we've tried to adapt the principles of many other great teams (148, 1114, etc...).

It's definitely not CAD experience. We do 95% of all our work in 2D AutoCAD.

I doubt it's project management, we rarely finish on time.
Since I've joined the team:

-2005: Competition robot did not drive on carpet until first competition.
-2006: Robot was a disaster. Did not have Jim full time this year.
-2007: Robot was finished 2 weeks early. Good robot. Could have done more, but was weary after 2006.
-2008: Complete design change on the arm prior to first competition.
-2009: Complete re-design during un-bag time before first competition.
-2010: Robot was done early. Added ball-magnet before first competition. Added climber throughout competition season.
-2011: Robot was finished early. Mini-bot development and deployment was finished week of first competition. Terrible code issued at first competition.
-2012: Best machine we have ever built. Robot was done early. No major issues throughout competition season.
-2013: Robot not finished when bagged. Major work to get functional before first competition. Climber developed and added throughout competition season.

So my guess would be mentor experience, attitude, and students. We expect that we will be able to create a World Class competition robot. We instill that expectation in our students. We devote as much time as possible (as mentioned before), given work and family requirements.

The other thing we have is almost instant access to parts and materials. We are very fortunate to have a build facility that we can make virtually any part that we would design for our robot. That allows us the opportunity to make design changes quickly.

I'm not sure I would recommend our design process or project management style to anyone else. It works for us....and we're willing to share it, but I don't think it is the "best" process bt any measure.

[Tom Ore]

Here's an off-the-wall thought:

When a company decides to delay a product launch, they decide that increased sales of a better product out weighs sales lost by the delayed launch.

What if teams earned qualifying points based on how long the robot was locked up. Lets say 1 week in the bag is the same as 1 win in the qualifying rounds. Now teams have to decide if losing the extra qualifying score is outweighed by a better robot.